Ahead of the Curve

In the century since its founding, Harvard BusinessSchool has become the single most influential institution inglobal business. Twenty percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500companies are HBS graduates, as are many of our savviestentrepreneurs (e. g. , Michael Bloomberg) and canniest felons(e. g. , Jeffrey Skilling). The top investment banks and brokeragehouses routinely send their brightest young stars to HBS togroom them for future power. To these people and many others,a Harvard MBA is a golden ticket to the Olympian heights ofAmerican business. In 2004, Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a postas Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join ninehundred other would-be tycoons on HBS’s plush campus. Overthe next two years, he and his classmates would be inundatedwith the best—and the rest—of American business culture thatHBS epitomizes. The core of the school’s curriculum is the“case”—an analysis of a real business situation from which thestudents must, with a professor’s guidance, tease lessons. DelvesBroughton studied more than five hundred cases and recountsthe most revelatory ones here. He also learns the surprisingpleasures of accounting, the allure of “beta,” the ingenious chicaneryof leveraging, and innumerable other hidden workingsof the business world, all of which he limns with a wry clarityreminiscent of Liar’s Poker. He also exposes the less savory trappingsof b-school culture, from the “booze luge” to the pandemicobsession with PowerPoint to the specter of depression thatstalks too many overburdened students. With acute and oftenuproarious candor, he assesses the school’s success at teachingthe traits it extols as most important in business—leadership,decisiveness, ethical behavior, work/life balance. Published during the one hundredth anniversaryof Harvard Business School, Ahead of the Curve offers a richlydetailed and revealing you-are-there account of the institutionthat has, for good or ill, made American business what it istoday.